Archive for August, 2010

OpenOffice is similar to Microsoft Word. Both have the ability to edit the Document Properties. This can be important. We like to edit the document properties on all our address label templates. There you will find so much more information about the label. We’ve got all of our vital information in there like email, website, telephone, and even a url. You can add your own customized information.

It’s important especially when putting your document on the internet. Folks will download it, and use it now and then. Then they’ll forget where they got it, but the properties will remind them where it came from. Nice.

I saw the double rainbow video for the first time this weekend on youtube. It’s a video that some guy took of a really beautiful rainbow, in fact, a double rainbow. His commentary seems pretty normal at first, but the he goes off the tracks. You have to be patient, the payoff comes late in the video, but it’s worth it. Very entertaining. Just take a look, you’ll see. After you look at that one, check out the Autotune song version of that video.
So when I found out one of our customers was using two of our products which both happen to have two labes on each page I had to write about this double Maco…..all the way. They use the CD/DVD label, the ML-7560, and they also use the half sheet ML-0200.

Maybe you’ve spilled some coffee on the envelope you were just about to mail. Well, don’t throw that messy envelope out, make it look like you meant to do it. Show the world you are an Artiste! Give it a messy address label to go with it. The Gimp has just the right function. It’s actually a filter. It’s called Coffee Stain. It’s under Filters, and Decor. I’ve made up a little messy address label with some stains for the ML-3000, and here it is, Bam!:

It takes commitment to be environmentally friendly. If you’re concerned about saving trees, and would like to live a little greener, here’s your chance. All of our front page items, like the ML-3000 , ML-2000, and such are available in recycled material. Just replace the ML prefix with RL, so the ML-3000 becomes the RL-3000, and the ML-8100 becomes the RL-8100.

Shipping labels are applied to all different kinds of packages. These packages go to all sorts of environments. They go to nice dry places like out west in Arizona, and California, and New Mexico, and they go to other places like the northern states and southern states like Florida and Louisiana. At some point your label might get wet. When printing your shipping labels, it makes sense to use a laser printer. You can use an inkjet printer, but a quick little rainstorm and a bit of inattention to a package can ruin things for everybody involved. Then when your package gets lost or is not delivered, you’ll look like this:

Doing a mail merge on address labels successfully can be a real project sometimes. Some mailing lists are nice and clean. You know, the kind that are residential addresses like:
John Smith
1 Space Way
Akron, OH 42808

Don’t try getting in touch with John, he’s a fig newton of my imagination, and is used strictly as an example to show what a nice clean simple address is. Oops, there I go again ending my sentence in a preposition. I like to live dangerously. Then, you come across lists which are not so neat, with names like:

Quentin is also a fig newton. These kinds of names need a little “massaging” to get the aches and pains out. If you’re printing on a 30 up label like the ML-3000 in Microsoft Word, depending on the font and font size you’re using, you’ll need to go through the list and find out if there are “Soft Returns” in your finished merged document. Soft returns occur when a line is too long to fit on a line, and the point at which the line wraps to the next line is a “Soft Return”. You can find these Soft Returns by doing a cntrl-f. Then once the Find and Replace dialog box pops up, select the “More” button if it isn’t already selected. If it’s already selected, then you should only see the “Less” button. Then hit the “Special” button.
Fail.
There’s no soft return that you can search for in Microsoft Word or OpenOffice, but you can search for the soft return character in WordPerfect. Why has WordPerfect fallen off the face of the earth as a word processor. I attribute it to propaganda. WordPerfect is a great word processing program that has features that Microsoft Word doesn’t, and if you’re in the market for a word processor, give serious consideration to WordPerfect.

I should have included this little tidbit a couple of posts ago, but I didn’t think of it until today. I was poking around in Open Office (OO), and I wondered how difficult it would be to find the same function that I was talking about in that post. I just wanted to be able to turn on or turn off, depending on my need, the non-printing borders that are the borders of each cell in the table of a label. I’m using an ML-3000 label here for example. It seems OpenOffice made it a bit easier to find this feature than in Microsoft Word. Simply go to Table, then Table Boundaries. It’s a toggle, so click to go back and forth between having the lines visible or invisible, and you’ll be seeing the label, or not.

I made a nice design in Inkscape with some flourishes. The ML-0600 shipping label is the perfect label to throw on some flourishes. Whether you’re sending out wedding invitations, or invitations to some sort of celebration, flourishes like the ones below can create the perfect label to show that the event is something special. And we all know how special anniversaries are, right guys? One of the secrets to a lasting marriage is to not only remember your anniversary, but to celebrate it in a meaningful way. So get your flourishes on and celebrate.

Got a call from a customer yesterday. They were using our ML-5000 label. It’s the UPC barcode label. People use it for all kinds of different things, not just UPC barcodes. She said there was a problem with the template. The Microsoft Word template was blank. I refrained from asking if she was sure, because it’s just not good form, maybe we made a mistake and put up the ML-0100 layout in place of the ML-5000. So I downloaded the ML-5000 template. I opened it up and it looked fine. I could see all the labels outlined with the blue dashed lines as usual. Hmmm. What to do, what to do. Ah, I told her just to see if the cells were really there, and just to click randomly on the page and start typing. Sure enough she said, yup the cells were there, she just wasn’t seeing the label on the template. Ok, now where has Microsoft 2003 hidden the view cell boarders feature? ……..Found it. It’s under Table Tools, Design, Borders, View Gridlines. So easy. Wuh? Gotta love Word.

Logo’s can be used anywhere for business. You can use them on letterhead, on signs, on the sides of cars and trucks. But obviously here at Macolabels.com, we’re only gonna talk about logos on shipping labels. Consider using Inkscape to design your logo.

If you think your company is super, and your company name begins with an M, you could go with the first letter like this:

And the great thing about using these SVG graphics, is that you can scale the image up or down without loss of quality. So whether putting them on a tiny return address label or a regular address label, or a larger shipping label, your graphics will look great.